Nick Sirianni did not look for cover. He walked into a London locker room full of players who had played through injuries and an early ejection, told them the defeat was his, and then said it again in front of the cameras. The Philadelphia Eagles head coach was blunt about the kickoff that let the Jacksonville Jaguars win on the final snap: “I didn’t make the right decision and I lost us that game.”

The confession is the story everyone ran, and it is real. It is also incomplete. Sirianni owned one decision and explained none. The call before it, the one that left Jacksonville enough clock to need only one big play, never came up. For a coach whose seat was already warming before his team crossed the Atlantic, accountability without a reason is thin armor.

The kickoff he owned

Trailing by two late at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, Jalen Hurts drove Philadelphia 32 yards in nine plays, and Jake Elliott hit from 48 yards for a 17-16 lead with eight seconds left. Sirianni then had Elliott kick deep into the landing zone, inviting a return, rather than taking a touchback or a line-drive squib, NBC Sports Philadelphia’s Dave Zangaro reported. Jacksonville had no timeouts left.

Ameer Abdullah ran it back to the Philadelphia 39. Jonathan Jones, who does not usually play on the kickoff unit, brought him down and thought he had ended it. “I looked up on the clock, saw zeroes, thought it was over,” Jones said. “And then one second got put back on.” Cam Little hit from 57 as time expired. Jaguars 19, Eagles 17.

Jones was on that unit because it had been thinned out from the opening snap. Jeremiah Trotter Jr., one of Philadelphia’s special-teams tacklers, was ejected after a fight on the first kickoff of the day, which Jacksonville returned for a touchdown before a holding flag erased it. Sports Illustrated’s Ed Kracz named the men left to stop Abdullah, Kelee Ringo, Jones and Arnold Ebiketie, wrote that they had no chance, and called the decision “coaching negligence.”

The clock call nobody asked about

Kracz also pointed at the decision the confession skipped. Down 16-14, the Eagles reached the Jacksonville 34 with 25 seconds left. Instead of running to bleed the clock, Sirianni called two passes: an incompletion, then a seven-yard catch by Makai Lemon, who stepped out of bounds. A run that lost three yards followed, and the Jaguars used their final timeout. Run the ball first, Kracz argued, and the field-goal unit takes the field with under five seconds to play. Instead it left eight.

The men who executed the plan said little to defend it. “I just went out and did what I was told,” Elliott said, adding that there was “so little time for me to kind of gather myself between the two things.” Hurts, asked whether he would have changed anything in those final seconds, turned the question on himself: “Should I have said something or should I have took a step back and said, ‘Wait?’”

Sirianni declined to explain his reasoning for the kickoff, CBS Sports noted. What he offered was a philosophy. “We want football to be as black and white as we possibly can, but there’s gray in it, right?” he said. Then: “I think it’s so important for every person to take accountability because that’s the only way you get better. You build trust that way.”

A coach spending his credit

That trait, the willingness to stand in front of the room and take the hit, has carried Sirianni since Philadelphia hired him in 2021. It carried him to two Super Bowls, including the 40-22 win over Kansas City in Super Bowl LIX. Credit like that buys patience. It does not last forever.

London was a third straight loss. At 2-3, the Eagles are under .500 for the first time since 2021, ending a franchise-record run of 76 games at .500 or better, according to CBS Sports Research. The defeat followed a 20-point loss to the Bears and a blown 10-point home lead against the Rams, with Lane Johnson’s abrupt retirement in between. Before the trip, ESPN’s Jeremy Fowler had already reported that Sirianni could land on the hot seat if the season did not turn.

The rest of the afternoon explains why his margin was so small. The Eagles ran for 22 yards. Hurts went 21 of 40 for 220 yards and a 62-yard touchdown to Darius Cooper, while Trevor Lawrence threw for 331 yards and two scores to Parker Washington, and the Jaguars moved to 4-1.

Sirianni’s players heard him take the blame, and in this building that still counts for something. What a locker room can’t take on faith forever is the reason. The next time a field goal leaves eight seconds on the clock, the Eagles will need to know their coach has one, because a confession has never tackled a kick returner.

Tags: NFL, Tampa Bay Buccaneers, Al Michaels, Jalen Hurts, Robert Kraft, Philadelphia Eagles, Terry Bradshaw